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Daylight Saving Time is Super Unpopular. Here Are the Countries Trying To Ditch It. (washingtonpost.com)
Daylight Saving Time ended in the United States on Sunday, bumping the clocks back an hour. The change happened in Europe a week earlier, meaning the time difference between the continents was momentarily smaller. It's another confusing wrinkle in a confusing temporal process that confounds the world. From a story: Today, 70 countries change their clocks midyear for Daylight Saving Time, including most of North America, Europe and parts of South America and New Zealand. China, Japan, India and most countries near the equator don't fall back or jump ahead. In much of Asia and South America, the Daylight Saving Time shift was adopted, but then abandoned. It has never been observed in most of Africa. While the United States extended its Daylight Saving Time in 2005 and Florida wants to make it its standard time, other countries are moving to ditch the practice.
The European Union is weighing a plan to abandon shifting from daylight saving time midyear. "Millions ... believe that summertime should be all the time," the European Union's chief executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, told German reporters in August. Juncker was referring, in part, to an online poll conducted by the E.U., which found that changing clocks is tremendously unpopular. (As my colleague Rick Noack pointed out, however, there are methodological problems: "The largest share of participants came from one country -- Germany -- where the time switch has been a somewhat odd front-page topic for years. But any E.U. decision would also impact the 27 other member states.")
The European Union is weighing a plan to abandon shifting from daylight saving time midyear. "Millions ... believe that summertime should be all the time," the European Union's chief executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, told German reporters in August. Juncker was referring, in part, to an online poll conducted by the E.U., which found that changing clocks is tremendously unpopular. (As my colleague Rick Noack pointed out, however, there are methodological problems: "The largest share of participants came from one country -- Germany -- where the time switch has been a somewhat odd front-page topic for years. But any E.U. decision would also impact the 27 other member states.")
I can't believe I've had to endure forced jet lag twice a year my whole life, for no reason that anyone can coherently articulate.
It would be nice if we can end it while I can still enjoy it, lol
"The largest share of participants came from one country -- Germany -- where the time switch has been a somewhat odd front-page topic for years. But any E.U. decision would also impact the 27 other member states.")
It seems screamingly obvious to me that most people would prefer a little extra daylight after work. That has the most utility to the most people. Make DST year round and be done with it. There is no reason that noon has to be the time of day when the sun is highest overhead. That's just tradition for the sake of useless tradition.
Since it's mostly automated it's weird that people would be so upset....but sure, if it actually serves no purpose anymore then get rid of it.
The weird thing is that this article recap doesn't mention why we're still using it, or what purpose it serves today.
Hopefully it's not a scenario where people that don't know anything are trying to tear down something they don't understand because it annoys them
Statistically, two of the most dangerous times of year come the week after each of the time changes as people's body-clocks don't match up with the time of day. There are an increase in accidents and deaths during this time.
I understand that there are concerns for children standing in the dark waiting for buses. Perhaps we need to make daylight savings time the standard time year round (or just make schools start an hour later and the suggested work day start an hour later).
Let's stop the charade and just set time to a static time year round.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
These DST threads are always super popular, but no one has anything original to say. It's the same complaints, the same arguments, the same proposed solutions, twice a year, year after year after year. Just write your Congressman already!
Let's just all switch to UTC and be done with the current mess already.
Or the 40K Imperial clock, that might be amusing...
Which makes sense considering they're the ones who came up with the whole thing.
With millennials. FIFY
Applying logic to reasoning is not their strong point.
It's noon when the sun crosses the local meridian. Solar noon is the only thing that matters or makes any sense for time keeping.
You "extra hour of daylight" horseshit is achieved by changing the start and end time of your workday, not fucking up ALL time keeping. Talk to your employer, change jobs, move, don;t be poor, do whatever you need to do for you. But fuck right off with imposing your ridiculous schedule on the planet.
Fuck daylight savings. Fuck all the "ingenious ideas". Solar noon is all that matters.
Daylight Saving Time does not "confound the world". It does, however, provide endless fodder for those who wake up every day looking for something about which to be outraged.
Forget ditching DST, get rid of standard time. Who cares if i go to work in the dark, I want to come home to enjoy some sunlight! During standard time in the winter I not only get the joy of coming to work in the dark, but getting home in the dark as well, because it's sunset by the time I leave.
I'd love to have an hour of daylight to get stuff done outside when i get home and not have to wait for the weekend!
It's not tradition for the sake of tradition, it's a clumsy attempt to get our mechanical clocks to align more closely with our biological clocks. Without any clocks, people naturally synchronize their activity to the sun, waking earlier in the summer and sleeping earlier (and longer) in the winter.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I know this will never happen (It's about as likely as adopting Stardates...) but UTC for everybody would solve the problem. Fact of the matter is, people do things at different times (like eat Breakfast) at different times (actual time, not clock time) around the world. The clock time should reflect that. I'm a bit biased because I deal with international video conferences and UTC would make things SO MUCH EASIER.
Why change the clock? Why not just change business hours if it's going to be year round?
Which do you think is easier? Mandating a clock change for everyone or convincing every business to simultaneously change their operating hours?
I suggest the former is the only practical solution.
Strictly speaking, our current work hours are tradition for the sake of useless tradition.
Quite true but getting that to change will be nigh impossible in any sort of organized fashion. Much easier to just change the clock for everyone. Defining noon as the time of day when the sun is highest overhead is an equally arbitrary and useless tradition but FAR easier to change.
It's noon when the sun crosses the local meridian. Solar noon is the only thing that matters or makes any sense for time keeping.
That is an arbitrary definition of noon. You could just as validly define 1pm or 3pm to be the time when the sun is at the highest point in the sky. Saying it has to be exactly at noon is just pointless tradition. The definition of the fundamental unit of time (the second) has zero relationship to the location of the sun in the sky. 1 second is defined to be exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles of a caesium atomic clock.
It's not tradition for the sake of tradition, it's a clumsy attempt to get our mechanical clocks to align more closely with our biological clocks.
At this point in time it very much is tradition for the sake of tradition. Since most people's daily activities have shifted towards later in the day it makes sense to change our time keeping to match that with the greatest utility.
Without any clocks, people naturally synchronize their activity to the sun, waking earlier in the summer and sleeping earlier (and longer) in the winter.
So what? We have clocks and are always going to have clocks so how about we set the time of day to have the most utility for the lives we actually lead?
There is a ballot measure tomorrow to put it under state control. I don't think it technically gets rid of it yet though. The description on the ballot is clear as manure.
Trouble with ditching the daylight savings concept is that EU's countries would benefit from different timezones. Poland and the Baltic states should stick to the winter time, while anyone west of Germany would benefit from the summer time.
standard time should be the fucking time!
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
What is Winter Sunlight?
So, the suggestion to use "summertime" all the time basically moves (Central) Europe into the East European timezone (UTC+2). Why? Why not leave it in its proper timezone (UTC+1)? Because the proles think "eternal summertime" means "eternal summer"?
Please ditch them.
I'm awake, I guess I'm going to work an hour early.
I think we should all use GMT. Think about all the electrons spent converting GMT to local time.
Mod me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I know that I'm going against the grain here, but LIKE daylight savings time. As it is in late August we start to run out of daylight for my son's little league baseball team and have to call games because of darkness. Without daylight savings time, they'd have one less hour to play ball and would have to start at 4:30, when the coaches and many parents are still at work.
For those who say that we should make DST year round, then my kids would have to walk to school in the dark in the dead of winter. No thanks.
DST works for me.
Does anybody really know?
OK, 30 Minutes of DST all year and be done with it!
How unpopular it is, is irrelevant. There are tons of things that are unpopular but still necessary, like taxes (Sorry US, but it's true).
The real question is whether there is a benefit to doing it. I have yet to read about one single actual tangible benefit to it. And no, the perception that you have "more daylight" doesn't count, because it's not true.
Meanwhile, the negatives are VERY large: Increased number of accidents due to fatigue. Health problems such as heart attacks caused by the shifts. Etc.
The whole concept of DST is idiotic, based on nothing resembling good reasoning, and should be eliminated.
He wrote solar noon. It's the exact and only definition of that.
Solar noon has ZERO relationship to the number 12 on our clocks. We can define noon to correspond to whatever number on our clock we want it to be. For part of the year we move it to be a different number than 12 because it's practical to do so.
If Europe is going to abandon it, the UK will need to implement summer time, double summer time, GMT and winter time, just to make things more difficult.
If I EVER meet Ben Fucking Franklin,
I WILL KICK HIS ASS!
The definition of the fundamental unit of time (the second) has zero relationship to the location of the sun in the sky
This is one of the most ignorant and sad statements I think I've read on the internet in the past year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second The second is a division of the rotation of the Earth. The rotation of the Earth was discovered and is marked by the position of the Sun. Caesium is a late means of very precisely measuring the length and divisions of a second. But, it ALL starts with the position of the Sun.
Since the dawn of man, seconds, clocks, noon... have been and continue to be based on the position of the Sun in the sky.
Well, did they actually ask them? I don't think so. Of course, being the EU, if they did ask people and got the answer they didn't want then they'd just keep asking them until they gave up and agreed so that they could get on with their lives.
I'm all for scrapping summertime, not keeping it permanently.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Just think, willy-nilly, we change clocks back or forward a whole hour, and we don't even do this world-wide. If we can do this - change time itself, something that has such a heavy importance in every society - couldn't we change any societal norm at the drop of a hat?
But, careful with that ax Eugene, once something's set into society, it's hard to change it, regardless how ridiculous it is.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Originally, DST was politically conceived to address two anomalies.
1) Duh, Daylight was very short during standard working hours, more daylight more productivity.
2) Depression triggers - Change was good; more sunlight more vitamin D less moods swing
Half a century its social media fodder for change, albeit back to no-change.
They merely want to end the CHANGE. They fucking WANT to keep DST. Just never change from DST.
"Switching to permanent DST would help the most people enjoy evening daylight."
Nope. Most people won't be helped by that. 50N is the average population belt. At that lat, DST doesn't help in winter.
And if it is THAT important to the majority of people, since earlier in the thread it was claimed that businesses have to do the core hours people want, then most people will be
1) Working just as usual, so no saved evenings for anyone
2) Can just as easily demand that the business change core hours from the moronic 9-5 to the noon-centric 8-4, meaning that you get home PRECISELY THE SAME TIME AS PERMA-DST. Fucking idiot.
Why the fuck is it only the summer that you need the evenings for? And that isn't increased by DST anyway.
Idiot.
By the way a lot of city dwellers dismiss the whole bus stop danger thing but out in country its a very problem.
People out in the country have been in the dark for generations, mostly by choice. Just look at all the churches, and how blindly they vote.
What difference does a little darkness around the bus stop in the morning really make, given that their eyes are tightly closed no matter how much illumination is (shed? wasted?) on them?
DST forever, ban ST!
Kinda the point. saying that he can ignore your imposition isn't anything more than a goalpost shift. The issue isn't whether the rules can be ignored (you can right now, so why the fuck are you complaining about when you have to get up in the dark? Just ignore the rule! Get up!), it's about changing the rules to fit you and if YOUR desires aren't ours, we can just ignore the rules.
Selfish fuckwits like you don't know or care what you're saying, all you want to know is if you're getting your own way.
This is not very objective reporting, is it?
I quite like DST. Without it here in the summer sunrise is 4:20 am, and sunset at 9 pm. That means more light when I'm asleep. And in winter, if dst was year round, sunrise would be 9:50.
So please keep the two clock changes per year. It's really worth it in so many locations.
And we've made them agree to the multitudes of changes to the working hours that legislation has made or the changes removing laws has driven.
So, yeah, the insistence that businesses should wag the entire population without whom they have neither workers nor customers, is complete bollocks.
Only question is why the fuck you morons insist on repeating it, despite this clear indication of its lack of coherent thought?
Also no spike in traffic accidents, heart attacks, etc.
In a post-agricultural society, all that stuff is optional and unnecessary.
Why do people still do it then? Tradition.
Why not get rid of the International Date Line? That's more confusing than DST.
When I flew from Sydney to Papeete, I arrived the day before I left, i.e., departed 8:30 p.m. Sunday from Australia...arrived after after 10 p.m.on Saturday--the day before--in Tahiti with no reservations because my stateside travel agent didn't consider the International Date Line. She might be forgiven since that was before airline schedules were computerized.
Is there DST in Alaska, Yukon, Northwest territories? Lapland? it's light most of the time in Summer, and dark much of the Winter. DST doesn't make sense in central and southern Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas where it cools down to a balmy 105 degrees F. at night.
So, what are the complaints about DST? It was for farmers and factory workers, so they say, but farmers aren't thrilled about milking cows in the dark. Oh, wait, they have lights!
I only have three things to set. Alarm clock, my Mustang, and my work car. Everything else is automatic, but, that being said, DITCH IT! Set it either standard time or DST and leave it alone.
Core hours 10-3. Ever worked or been in a workplace?? Because if you have, then you already had all the evidence you whined about needing first.
most of my clocks change automatically, and those that don't, about half are wrong til the next change since I am too lazy to change them ":-)
When you claim "it would have to be replaced with laws that tried to tell businesses when people could work.." explain why it would HAVE TO BE. You insisting means fuck all.
Businesses are still being told when to get up by the government telling the clocks to be changed. Yet somehow this doesn't seem to be a problem for businesses to accept.
Ben Franklin is laughing at all of us from beyond the grave.
I love DST. You know why I love DST? It's because I don't like the Sun coming up at 4 in the morning. That's why. 5AM is bad enough (well, 4:47 on the earliest sunrise day this year). So no. Let's not ditch DST.
Just end it.
Now.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Ya mean Nazis want the trains to run on time? Who'da thunk it?
And to think all this fuss doesn't change the fact we still have 24 hrs. in a day.
People don't hate Daylight Saving Time, at least not most of them. They hate changing the clock twice a year; and if they prefer one time scheme over another, they tend to prefer DST over Standard Time. Assuming of course they actually figure out which is which. DST, of course, the one that just ended, is the summer time scheme where it stays light longer in the evening. It's always surprising to me how many people think they hate DST when it's actually ST they hate.
And to think all this fuss doesn't change the fact we still have 24 hrs. in a day.
Yes, it does.
Last Saturday had 25 hours. A Saturday in the spring had 23.
A standard time day is a legal construct, not a physical one.
And do you have ANY IDEA how much that complicates automated systems (like building energy management) that have to deal with getting things to happen at the right time for production schedules? *I* do. I had to write some of those programs. B-b doesn't even begin to express it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
True, but parents often have to drop their kids off while heading to work. Later school hours would make such difficult. (Buses seem to be going away for some reason.)
Table-ized A.I.
Florida resident here, our state legislator voted to end daylight savings, it was supposed to happen this past weekend. Unfortunately, it did not happen because the Federal government believes it has the power to dictate what our clocks say. Apparently is in the Constitution in the Preamble when it says, 'the Federal government know the best time for you' and the 10th Amendment where it says ' the Federal government has all the powers, not just the ones defined in the Constitution'. It really grinds my gears.
Let's go back to the way they used to do it. 12 hour days and 12 hour nights.
Oh, but the length of the hours changes. Ah, those were the days, when noon was a 1500.
First, call it daylight savings time... pisses off all the morons who think itâ(TM)s a good idea. (It is Daylight SavING Time, dammit! they exclaim.). Then tell people who support it to eat your ass. Because they should. Because it started off as a stupid idea, then morphed into a really stupid idea, and today, has become a full-blown stupid fucking idea, and it needs to be fucking abolished because it is pointless, fucks everything up twice a year, and is a giant waste of time, energy and resources.
Hereâ(TM)s a MUCH better idea. Change Earth from having 24 time zones to 48, setting each a half-hour apart, so that anyone living anywhere on Earth ends up having a much better chance of not being up to an HOUR off all year round, from the ACTUAL local time wherever he/she IS.
Or you can do what I did for a time, as an experiment, and set my clocks to local time according to solar noon where I live.
Trouble is, everyone elseâ(TM)s clocks were consistently wrong, and I eventually grew tired of having constantly to correct for THEIR perceptions of time.
It seems near certain that the vast majority of people are either on the "get rid of it" side or the "meh, don't care side". I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually express the opinion "oh yeah, DST is essential". And it's been that way for decades now. But still we have it.
The problem is once a law gets passed, there is then a huge amount of legislative inertia to get it repealed/changed.
It's for this reason I think every law, every single law, ought to have an expiration date. The important ones will get renewed and the ones no one actually cares about anymore (or at least, the great majority of people don't care about) will lapse into automatic repeal.
Here in the US we should, move out clocks to DST + 1hr so solar noon and clock noon are at the same time. Daylight will wax and wane as the seasons change, but there is not an excessive amount od daylight am or pm. But mostly, it's just logical.
If we all switch to UTC the businesses won't have a choice. They will have to establish new schedules everywhere out side of the EU anyway.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
...that the UK won't ditch it. They'll keep crying about "how it's tradition," and they'll obstinately cling onto it.
And the fact the EU are suggesting abolishing it makes that belief so much firmer. (The UK hates the EU.)
I work for a global company and have to meet with people in wide-ranging time zones. When discussing what time work will be done, we have to be very careful to specify the time zone, but with nearly 300,000 employees, mistakes and miscommunications will happen, We should have just one time zone to simplify the lives of everyone on the planet that uses a clock on a regular basis.. All that would entail is changing the names of the times we do things. For example, suppose we set UTC as the universal time zone. Suppose further that you are in what is currently called the Eastern Standard Time zone. Instead of sunrise being at 7:00AM, it will be at 12:00PM. Instead for working from 9:00AM to 5:00PM, you will work from 2:00PM to 10:00PM. Everything relative to the Sun, Moon, etc. stays the same, only what you call the hours has changed. You can as easily say you work from Bazzumass to Cruntle as 9 to 5 if that suits your purpose.
Of course, somethings will become anachronistic, such as references to "high noon" and "twelve midnight". One day, their meanings will become as obscure as Shakespeare's references to merkins.